Agreed, Hounskull, completely. As a law student, I would be asking for academic suicide if I used something other than Lexis or Westlaw. These services allow you to zero in on specific legal points that appear only once or twice in very long opinions; conduct broad searches across jurisdictions, administrative records, secondary sources, etc.; and, perhaps more importantly, use indexing features to "browse" for answers, rather than search. The entire value of Lexis or Westlaw is simply not the primary material itself.

I agree with the sentiment: it's very off-putting when private companies have such strangle-holds on public information. But, like Hounskull says, it's not the information per se but how the services digest and organize that is valuable. Without these services, practicing and studying law would be far more inefficient, if not impossible.

@Noen.

Fair enough. But I do think "homiletic" is a big word for someone apparently deriding academics/educated folk.

@Pyros

Like other posters, I haven't looked at the lecture yet, though I have seen videos of Lessig discussing this issue elsewhere.

Regarding your post:

That's great etc etc. But why do you assume the character of a populus is an exogenous component to "corruption"? You impugn Lessig's "puritanical thinking" and his elitism. After you use "homilitic" in a sentence. If you aren't the product of higher eduction, congratulation, I'm impressed. Most college graduates can't use that word. But if you are [the product of higher education] wouldn't that make you an elite as well?

Back to "puritanical" Lessig: Lets look at your statement differently: Were the people who elected Hitler just responding to badly incentivized government/legal institutions? Would you say those inter-war Germans knew their best interests too?

I know; I played the Hitler card. Still, the difference is one of degree. We are every bit as responsible for the absurdity of American democracy as the Germans who elected Hitler were responsible for later atrocities. They made their bed and slept in it. It's lazy thinking to say we can't blame ourselves for the state of our country. It's much easier, as you demonstrate, to point at "elites" and describe our situation as something done to us.